One of the hot tickets currently on-line are in-text relevance advertising. All the big publishers are testing this idea using various implementations. I’m using Kontera. I’ll be testing the overall effectiveness, annoyance factor, click through and other elements. Most of all I wonder if these links are doing well for many site just because they are a curiosity. It’s hard to resist clicking opn them when you first see them. Ziff is using someone’s system on my online column, for example. The ad links in the case of this blog are double underlined and in green. I welcome any other suggestions. I also apologize in advance for any possible annoyance.
What words will Kontera deem relevant for this blog?
“booth”; “babe”; “boobs”; “fake”;”DRM”; “P0rn”; “Christians”; “evil”; “criminals”; “dumb”; “Microsoft”; “sucks”; “British”; “teeth”; “bad”
Those should be very interesting ads! 😉
Actually, it’s makes sense for John to put this ad thing on.
It allows me to fine-tune my Firefox and /etc/hosts file settings.
So far it works, not a single ad, blog looks exactly the same as last week.
Good point. It should be:
“M$”; “sucks”; “No!”; “Mac”; “weenies”; “Linux”; “users”; “smarter”; “neener”; “neener”
If those links would connect to some hot babes that this site shows off and on maybe I will enable js back 🙂
John’s CRANKY!!!! Watch out Sebastian!!
Cripes!
John, your petulant howl in #24 misses the point. They are aesthetically ugly and as a writer you should know that blocks and barriers in the presentation of content interferes with understanding. The only people who think that in-text and similarly obtrusive ads are worthwhile are aesthetically blind and illiterate moneygrubbers, fresh from destroying television and film by viewing such things primarily as vehicles for extracting cash in more and more ingenious and mucky ways and at the expense of creative endeavour.
As a professional writer it’s entirely reasonable that you should not only cover the costs of running a site but earn income from it when you contribute copy. So I’ve no problem whatever with your seeking to raise income and if that means ads then that’s fine too. But these things are just gross, tacky and sordid and what’s they’re actually saying is, “Hey, the income is more important than the content; the thrust of the ads takes precedence over the wishes of the readers or the look of the site.”
Remember that what the web gives it also takes away. Virtually everyone here is hostile to this initiative and loyalty is a complex phenomenon which you take for granted at your peril.
You thought it was an idea worth trying. Fine! It’s obviously not. You don’t need to run it for a month to see that. Just pull it now. Put it down to experience. Listen to the collective wisdom of your audience.
Add Adblock in firefox and block any url with Kontera.
15 second fix.
For Science sake! Turn that shit off!
For Pete’s sake, let the guy try to make some money. They aren’t that bad. I find them much less distracting than the image based ads around the content. John you won’t loose me over this. And I doubt you will loose many others either.
So you’re reading along, getting “in” to the article when you come accross the phrase “technology”. You realize it’s and add because it’s green with double underline. You think to yourself :
“I like technology, should I click on this link and see if if has value for me? No, it’s just an add and I don’t have the extra money right now even if I do like what they’re selling. But maybe, if I really like what they’re selling I could save-up until I can afford it. Oh well, I’ll try it…”CLICK”. Huh? What’s this? I’m not into that. Let’s see, where was I? I can’t remember what that article was about.???. Think I’ll go check my email.”
nough said.
Just added Kontera to my adblock list in Firefox…
Enough to make me lose this feed, I hate them
This page has to be the most ad ridden site I’ve ever entered…almost bad as those free porn sites I used to visit back in the 90s. Thank god adblock gets rid of most of it.
riddled i mean
#39 I wish I said that!!
Oh God! An advertisement. Oh God. It’s pulling my mouse out of my hand and I just have to mouse over it. It’s a simple ad. There are still things out there like cancer, hunger and other things and you guys are whining about a f**king text ad. Find a real issue and devote your energy to that. Make the world a better palce and not a world of cry-babys. Sheesh.
i’d like to weight in on the “awful and annoying” side… but then again i said the say thing about the mouse.
I don’t mind them. When interested I mouse over when not I don’t…
What we’re seeing here is the knee-jerk resistance to almost any kind of advertising on the web which, ironically, is partly the fault of advertisers themselves. Everyone wants free stuff but they don’t want to suffer ads to support it. That’s the internet freebie mentality for you.
The annoyance of mouse-over triggering is real though, and should be eliminated. This mouse-over crap is one of the reasons some people banish all ads. Yahoo seems to love ads that fill up your page when you mouse over them on your way to the browser menu/toolbar — worse than popups.
I know some other site owners who use these links and make a ton of money, so someone is clicking. If people are clicking at a decent rate, I think that speaks volumes about the silent majority. Plus–at least these ads are usually relevant!!!
They’re less obtrusive than the ads that cover half the screen when you accidentally roll over them and then have to click on them to close them.
#49. Slightly smart aleck, but I guess I see the logic. It’s 2007 and servers aren’t cheap. I’m just glad the links are “disguised” to look like normal hyperlinks. I can figure out the difference and avoid them when I want to. It would be cool if they had movie trailers in them. For those of you that are blocking all of the ad content using adblock, how is it that you propose that John pay for this site and earn a living?
#27 — uh, that too 🙂
OMG! GREEN TEXT PWNS ME!
What a bunch of crybabies. Block them if you want. Or just don’t hover over them.
To quote JCD, “Cripes.”
You are the best julieb. Curiously today most of the links are on this comment page!
Weird.
What you are seeing is the problem with Net adverts.
If you figure a minimum of 5 per page viewed. A person sees MORE frmes of adverts then on MOST TV.
and its easy access for the advertisers to gartner from the web sites and those Running the site NEEd the money to keep the sites up.
What I WANt to see, is that the Adverts ARENT pulled from another sites DATA that could include Anything, and I dont want to see it scripted to track ME.
I don’t mind these ads at all. It is a new form of advertising that I think everyone is going to have to 1) get used to and 2) stop whining about.
Remember when banner ads first appeared? So many people thought that that was the end of the internet. Now, you can’t go to any page without seeing a banner ad. People got used to them, just like people will get used to this in text relevancy.
To feed of off #54, these ads are clearly not as annoying as those ads that take you to a whole new URL and you have to click “skip this ad” to finish reading what you were reading. Pop-ups are annoying too, but people get used to them, just as people will get used to in text.
Advertising is constantly changing and evolving, and if you want to keep reading websites for free, then learn to deal with it.
You really don’t have to ask people if an ad is annoying, the answer is yes.
I didn’t know they existed here, adblock plus must be doing a good job for me.
ECA – Stop being so dramatic. OK, you were “exposed”. I was too when I read the Wall Street Journal this morning. Are you realy going to stop reading the newspaper because the ads are “just too many”? Stop comparing things that aren’t even the same class.